Speed up your old Mac with a SSD Upgrade

If your Mac is around 5 years old or so, there is probably nothing seriously wrong with it except that it might have become very slow overtime. You might consider replacing it with a new one but there is one upgrade we can suggest that will give your older MacBook, Mac mini or iMac a new lease on life.

Upgrade your Mac by replacing its old hard drive with a SSD.

A Solid State Drive (SSD) can be installed in any old MacBook, Mac Mini or iMac that comes with a traditional hard drive to make it radically faster and snappier. A SSD gives you a whopping 3200MB/s read and up to 2400MB/s write speed, while it also consumes less power, helping your Mac to run significantly cooler.

To test how fast is a SSD really, I decided to upgrade my 2010 MacBook Pro 13-inch which had a 4GB of RAM and slow 5400RPM laptop hard drive by Seagate. I took out the hard drive and replaced it with a 500GB Samsung 840 SSD.

I can tell you the process isn’t as straight forward as I thought, so if you are not comfortable opening up your MacBook, or mess with your hard drive, which btw contains all your applications and data, you might want a local repair shop to do this for you.

If you are in Dubai you can always get in-touch with our Mac geniuses at Tech Experts, they can professionally install the SSD and make sure that you that you have all the necessary applications installed on the new SSD and the data from the old drive is safely transferred over.

After the upgrade, the results are impossible to deny. Booting up this MacBook use to take at least four minutes on the hard drive, but on the SSD the whole booting process took just 30 seconds. Read and write speeds have improved drastically, and programs loaded instantly.

Disk speed results before and after the SSD upgrade.

Again, this particular upgrade isn’t for the faint hearted. Apple doesn’t make it easy to upgrade Macs. You will also need to know how to make a bootable macOS installer and may be enable TRIM support for your SSD. Apple doesn’t make it easy to upgrade Macs, and that’s the way they like it.

In the end if you choose it yourself or would like to get the SSD upgrade done through an expert, it’s well worth the effort.